The Moz Blog

PPC vs. SEO: Sibling Rivalry at Its Best - Whiteboard Friday

And now it's PPC coming into the ring... he is looking ready to rumble! Pumping his fists, he's showing off to the audience - looking to the left, to the right, and - wait, what's that!? The crowd is going wild! PPC just straight out dissed SEO, who's in the other corner, looking ready to strike! I tell ya, folks, I haven't seen a rivalry this bitter since the great Northeastern College of Computer and Information Science Star Wars vs. Lord of the Rings debate of '07! Well, maybe more bitter than that, actually... the point is, PPC and SEO may be siblings, but their contention with one another can run deep. Danny helps us sort out the strife and bring this band of brothers together (and actually keeps his bias out of it, kind of!). Don't forget to use your nails, boys!

Video Transcription

Hello, everybody. My name is Danny Dover. I work here at SEOmoz doing SEO. Today I'm excited about Whiteboard Friday. We're doing "Sibling Rivalry: PPC versus SEO." As you can probably assume, I'm a big SEO junkie. I like making fun of PPC. I was talking to the PPC people on our team, Joanna Lord, who does that for us here, and she told me that I need to be on my best behavior. I need to try to be unbiased. I am going to try my hardest. I invite all of you to submit videos if you think that I am being too biased and you want to submit your viewpoint. Please submit them to my email address danny@seomoz.org. If it's good enough, we'll embed it on this blog so we can give people the biggest perspective possible. I know that working video cameras is hard for you PPCers. Just remember to hit record and take the lens cap off. This is not a good start to being unbiased.

Okay. So, PPC and SEO, the thing I'm talking about, of course, is what you see on search engine result pages. You'll see on the top and on the right in the United States are ads. You're going to pay for those. Those are what I am referring to when I talk about PPC, pay-per-click. SEO, search engine optimization, will be the rest of the page. Both of these, you know, they're two different channels for marketing. They're trying to accomplish the same goal. They're both trying to drive traffic to a specific thing. Whenever you are looking at two different channels of the same thing, it's important to figure out what are the pros, what are the cons, what are the strengths, and what are the weaknesses. How can these work together? When is it more appropriate to use one rather than the other? Let me talk about the pros and cons of PPC and SEO.

The cons of PPC are really, really long, but I had to simplify it so I could fit it on the whiteboard here. With PPC, it starts really quickly. So, if you want to be showing up in Google for example, you can create an ad campaign and in the same day your ads will be showing up. It's also a lot easier to measure than SEO. In fact, this is something I'm envious of PPCers. While I can use analytics and stuff, it gets complicated to try to measure SEO because you cast such a wide net. Whereas PPC, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and everyone else have built some great interfaces. They've done some great things. So it's a lot easier to measure your direct ROI on PPC.

The downside to PPC is that it cost a lot of money as compared to traditional SEO. You're going to pay for every single click that comes through. That's going to add up over time. In case you don't know, it works on an auction system, so you're going to pay more for more competitive keywords, which is not necessarily the same system with SEO.

With SEO it has a slower start-up. So, in fact, SEO can take a long time to start working. But it is essentially free. Once you do it once, it is in place and assuming best practices don't change, which they usually don't, it's going to build on itself over time. The start-up cost is slower. It costs you less money, and it builds on itself over time. By that, I mean, with SEO if you get a link from The New York Times for example, that link's going to help you for the lifetime of the link. If you run an ad with PPC, an ad that ran a year ago is not necessarily going to help you. To be fair, it could, you could argue it could help you from a branding perspective, but not in the same way that a mention in The New York Times would and actually give you direct link to and help you rank higher in Google.

On to the major contention points. This is where it gets a little bit more fun. The first one is budgets. PPC and SEO are generally put in marketing departments in companies. It varies of course. That means that they need to fight each other for budgets, along with all the other marketing channels. So, this is where I see the biggest contention. I think generally people realize that PPC and SEO are trying to accomplish the same thing -- drive traffic. But PPC costs a lot more money up front. SEO costs a lot more money down the road to get these big initiatives through.

The next one is dev resources. Admittedly, SEO is much more dev heavy or development resource heavy than PPC. You could technically run a PPC campaign without any developers. But if you want to be creative and a better person, you could do SEO, and you're going to need the help of developers. With marketing resources, people who are writing the ad copy and the people who are planning what the campaigns are going to be, it's going to take more of your traditional markers, marketers to do that. Not markers. Although markers, you do use markers. So that could work. See that made sense. It did.

Lastly are the conflicting best practices. This is actually where when I am working with people at SEOmoz this is where we butt heads. With things like, especially when it comes to tracking, tracking parameters, this can be one of the biggest pros of PPC. It is really, really easy to measure. Part of that is implementing things that are not best practices for SEO, be it URL parameters or putting in a lot of duplicate content so you can test lots of different landing pages or be it keywords, keyword cannibalization. A lot of times you'll be targeting the exact same words with your PPC campaigns as your SEO campaigns. That's a good thing usually, because you want to dominate the entire SERP. But it also means that you can run into keyword cannibalization issues where pages you don't necessarily want to rank organically start to. Don't worry. I'll talk about how to work with some of those things.

That brings us right into the tips for playing nice. The first one I think is probably the most important. Understand that you're both working on the same team and that you need to unify your message. I said already, this will be my third time, you're both trying to drive traffic. Make sure you are using similar phrases and that you're trying to get to the same end goal when you're doing this.

That segues nicely into the other one, which is learn each other's jobs. I've actually learned a lot about SEO by trying to understand PPC. The same thing goes the other way around. Someone who knows a lot about PPC can learn a lot about improving their quality score by learning SEO basic best practices.

Share research and win. There are two important points here. The research. The first one that comes to mind is most of the SEO keyword research I do is through PPC tools. If you're both trying to target the same words, it would make a lot of sense just to share that data. If you're seeing words in SEO, like organic listings convert really well, you should probably tell your PPC person that as well. It's just going to help the company as a whole.

The second one is share wins. Some days you're going to have SEO wins. Some days you're going to have PPC wins. It's important to celebrate each other's wins. You're going for the same goal here. Plus, you get to celebrate more. If you're at SEOmoz, this might be a Champagne Wednesday or something, right? The more you can drink in the office, the better. Share your wins. I highly recommend it.

This one over here is design campaigns together. I don't necessarily mean have your SEO writing copy for your PPC campaign. I do mean talk about implementation. How are these landing pages going to be structured on the site? What are they going to look like? Are they nofollow? Are they blocked by robots.txt. What general ideas are you trying to target? The same thing with SEO. What message are we conveying through this URL structure? How is it going to affect quality score? Important things like that. Just make sure that multiple people working on these two different channels are working together when planning these different campaigns.

Number five is understand each channel's strengths and weakness. So, PPC for example is great because it can be very temporal. If you want to get an ad up today and be what looks like ranking for something, which it's really not, you can do it day of. It you just want to spend a lot of money, you can rank number one for whatever it is you want depending on your budget. Whereas SEO, you can't do that. SEO, on the other hand, it will take you a lot longer, but for relatively low budgets you can rank competitively for high term. We see a lot of startups do this. They'll have a great SEO campaign. They'll do great content. They'll start ranking for ridiculously competitive things. Mint.com did this originally. Their blog ranks extremely well for personal finance related things. They have a lot of great marketing channels, but SEO is one of the ones that really kicked butt and saved them, at least I'm assuming here, saved them a lot of money because they didn't have to pay for the PPC ads, although they did on the side. But they didn't need to. They drive a lot of traffic organically.

The last one is be liberal with rel=canonical and meta robots. This is more from an SEO perspective. By this I mean rel=canonical, if you're going to have lots of URL parameters that show up a lot on blogs for tracking things, be liberal with this. Use it as much as you can. At SEOmoz, we're trying to get it implemented on every single page so that if someone has a bunch of parameters through our URLs, it will always go back to one canonical version.

The second part of this is meta robots. There are very, very few cases where you should ever use robots.txt to block a page because you're just creating a black hole in your website and you're wasting links. But with landing pages for PPC it make a lot of sense to noindex them so they don't start competing against pages that are SEO driven, but you should share the link value within them. So, using a follow. There'd be a meta robots noindex follow.

I think that's all I got, other than PPCers are big dum-dum heads. I invite you to share your own video clips explaining the other perspective of this. I appreciate your time. I'll see you next week on Whiteboard Friday. Thank you.

Mini Update: Peter Sargent from simplyhealth.co.uk put together an excellent summary of the benefits and weaknesses of SEO and PPC which is very useful for explaining this subject to curious co-workers. You can download the SEO and PPC PDF here.

If you have any tips or tricks that you've learned along the way, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

About Aaron Wheeler —
Aaron is the manager of the Help Team at SEOmoz. He's usually thinking about how to scale customer service in a way that keeps customers delighted. You'll also find him reading sci-fi, watching HBO, cooking up vegetarian eats, and drinking down whiskey treats!

53 Comments

Personally, as someone that offer both to clients, I think that the best results are when SEO and PPC collaborate, if not go hand-in-hand.

You spotted the main reason in WBF: quality score.

That tricky PPC Algo as a lot to do with SEO, IMO, at least with a good on page optimization. Infact, it says that one of the factor for a good/high quality is the coherence between the ad, the keyword used in the PPC campaign and the landing page. That means that if Adwords cannot literally see the keywords or semantically similar text in the Landing page, probably the quality score would tend to be bad since the beginning of the PPC campaign. And, as you probably know, the worst the quality score is the highest the bid to be present in the first page with your ad... and the highest the less you pay (you can also pay less of the ones behind you if you reach a quality score of 10).

Who may help optimize this part of PPC? SEOs IMHO are the ones that could it better.

Another "moment" SEOs and PPCer can join their forces is related to keyword hunting. Both systems rely on keyword to work, and the better the keyword hunting phase is done the better both web marketing tactics work. More over, SEOs have all to learn from the analytical datas PPC produce in the keyword field, for instance detecting those keywords that better conversion rate offer in order to SEO optimize the site with classical SEO action (on page, link baiting, new content...). And the same advantage can PPCer have from the daily/weekly analisis SEOs do about the long tail, sources, trends...

Finally, I would not forget that PPC, especially for brand new sites, is the easiest way to start spread the news they are on the web. In this sense a PPC campaign can have a collateral SEO effect (and faster even than a Social Media campaign in this web-baby-born phase) in generating traffic that may generate buzz, that may generate links and tweet and likes, plus - obviously and hopefully - monetary conversions.

So... about the "budget civil war": that's true... but that could be solved if that one above the two, the (Online) Marketing VP would really be able to think at SEO and PPC as two complementary tactics with the same level of importance and to play with the budget with a correct and strategic profiling. I mean, SEOs and PPCer should have to ally to have both better budgets (sorry offline marketers) and not fight one against the other.

I've heard much debate on the impact of landing page relevancy on ad placement and quality score. I've seen many make the case that it's important that your landing page not be a redirect or a virus ridden slum, but that SEO'ing your landing page for ad placement is irrelevant for ad placement. Below, straight from Google, are the criteria for quality score for ad Rank. It says nothing about landing page relevancy, unless you stuff it in the "other" category.

Thoughts anyone?

The Quality Score for Ad Rank on Google and search partners is determined by:

The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on the site. For Google, only historical performance on Google is considered. For search partners, performance on the specific search partner is used, along with how the ad performs across the search network.

Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account

I wrote what I wrote over the base of experience with many different kind of websites and, obviously taking in account all the others factors you listed from Adwords (being CTR surely the most important), I noticed that totally new campaign with no historical datas can have keywords with low Quality Score even though those same keywords are optimized... and what I concluded is that landing page factors are in game. And that classical SEO factors (for instance visibility of the keywords and context) is one of those "other relevance factors": for instance normally works better a landing page in Html/CSS that one totally developed in Flash.

Anyway, the Help section of Adwords explain it better than me the importance of the landing page as a factor:

I tend to agree with you, but there just seems to be a lack of data and stories about people increasing QS through landing page edits. I have never seen any structured tests that measured the impact of landing pages on QS. Thanks for sharing your experience with it.

It is all about getting the mixture correct. Both PPC and SEO have their strengths and weaknesses. The best match is using them together and maximizing the utilization of resources. That said, that is a hell of a lot easier said than done :-)

There's so much potential win in the research you can do with a PPC campaign (however short or long) that it's invaluable to SEOers.

* You can be testing two different ad copies, two different offers and find out which one works best. i.e. you can find out what makes your audience tick

* You can quickly and easily test what keywords are profitable, then tie numbers to those.

* SEOs can be accountable. PPCs are always accountable.

Sure, the big win in the long run is with a well executed SEO campaign, but what's going to be deciding the figures when management is choosing budgets for search marketing... PPC?

I understand SEO far more, but reading around the Adwords/PPC folks there's a huge amount the SEO community can learn from 'the other side'. I've got a draft YOUmoz post titled as such which I might polish off and upload now.

Another great edition of White Board Friday. IMO the best tip and wanted to reinforce was that PPC & SEO togetherness.... is the best strategy. There have been tons of examples where seeing terms convert under one channels and then being reinforced with the other has been able to drive results. Also PPC a lot of the times can blaze the way for SEO and get some quicker results and help refine the SEO strategy.

Using SEO & PPC together gives you the best of both worlds and nearly always produces better results. As others have said you learn things from each that can be applied to the other discipline. In the end; it is all search and most users outside the tech industry don't know the difference between an organic and paid result.

I really liked Danny's summary, but I'd like him to consider cost (a big part of ROI) a bit more fully.

SEO's true cost should really include the costs of organic publishing. All those pages it takes to get SEO rank had to be written, and if they're published at scale they're running in a CMS. Add in the substantial manual labor of building links, and the time value of money for this investment and SEO at scale isn't a low budget proposition.

My organic publishing team is far larger that the PPC crew. Organic's tools cost more because them manage thousands of pages vs. in my case landers.

I'd suggest to be world class either one of these is both rewarding and expensive. And that's its the immediate return curve of PPC vs. the persistant advantage of SEO that needs to be fitted business by business.

Good point, I suppose I have a bit of a blind spot there as at SEOmoz writing content and doing SEO fall under the same job description. You are right that in most organizations the content writers are not full time SEOs.

I really liked how the little man you draw pointed out that SEO and PPC, although coming at it from different angles, both try to drive traffic... but you have to explain that little man drawing Danny, its driving me mad!

One of the hugest advantages PPC has over SEO is the ability to control the landing page. In natural search, Google chooses where to send your visitors. In paid, you can send people to a highly-optimized landing page specifically designed to speak to them.

Ive always found PPC to be a viable marketing tool for the initial 4 - 6 months of the SEO campaign( I too am a hardcore Organic SEO proponent). After we see the site (if a new URL) come out of the "sandbox" I then always suggest to my clients that they begin to throttle down their PPC efforts. My research shows that a new SEO campaign coupled with short lived PPC goes a long way to garner some credibility with the search engines. Great white board friday! I appreciate the time and effort that goes in to making these, keep em' coming! For anyone who is interested Stanford University has an entire department dedicated to persuasive content delivery, a definite read for anyone who is interested in the pure science of content and online marketing... http://captology.stanford.edu/

One thing that I didn't notice mentioned was the impact of PPC campaigns on SEO; I've read and noticed several examples of a business's PPC campaign having a direct impact on a website's organic traffic. Obviously more for the actual business name but I would imagine the branding generated by PPC ads would affect the click thru of all organic results.

It would be interesting to see and/or read more about successful joint strategies between these two avenues.

I do both PPC and SEO and I have never understood this sibling rivalry between these two channels of search marketing. I don't have time to do a video back to you so I posted my thoughts on my blog instead - http://wp.me/poVmT-1F

I work with like 25 PPC people on a daily basis, I mean SEO is looked at like the evil little brother of PPC as we dont spend revenue and we go for the FREE model =) Yet I think the best thing is where you can take a bit of learning from both, I mean I know a bit about PPC but I feel that that team members are alwasy keen to learn a bit about SEO.

Being an SEO guy as well, I found your humor very entertaining. While I enjoyed you giving PPCers a hard time, you brought up a very valuable point in your “tips for playing nice section” – design a campaign together. As you’ve stated, it’s important that your SEO and PPC campaigns are on the same page. It makes no sense for one campaign to try and rank for different keywords or phrases than the other. Plus, if you can get your SEO and PPC ads on the same search engine results page, the chances of you getting someone to your site or landing page increases significantly.

I like the differences, playing one off the other and, especially, when I can pull my organic up near my paid search. It's a beautiful thing (unless budgets are cut).

With analytics, I completely agree. It's so much easier to track paid searches through Google Analytics and other PPC analytic tools than follow the long trail organic can take.

Still, it's valuable to know about, if not be an expert in, both PPC and SEO. I find a variety of interesting keywords, paths and tests can be developed from one to the other.

Each platform has a different audience. You never know what one or the other will turn up that you hadn't thought about for use in the other.

For example, looking at analytics you could uncover a variety of sites to look at for placements. You could also check what keywords convert for one platform over the other and test across both.

I'm curious to see how GI affects SEO and PPC.

Seems like it's narrowing the majority of searches since Google receives something like 20% new searches it's never seen before and with GI that would seem to be less likely.

I understand Bing has used this type of system for over a year, however with the shear volume of Google traffic I'm watching, in both PPC and SEO, what affects it could have on the long tail and variations of my most important keywords.

I am not a pro SEO, I am a business owner in Seattle; but I have been working on my own sites with some success since April. SEOMOZ and the pro tools has been great for me;..and I first discovered SEOMOZ watching Danny's video

The key is that to get maximum sales opportunity for any given term, you need to use SEO and PPC. The majority of users click on natural listings, but without PPC you're missing part of your target audience. The more successful your SEO campaign, the more likely you are to have budget available to mop up all the PPC clicks too, at a sensible CPA.

You mentioned a few examples of where PPC and SEO work together and I totally agree. What rationale can there be for having completely separate groups managing SEO and PPC? Of course you want to use specialists doing the doing, but if you're not working to one all encompassing search strategy and working/sharing information as one team, then you're going to be inefficient.

Nice post. It made me laugh out loud more than once. PPC can be a great way to test a bunch of keywords during the keyword research phase of an SEO project to evaluate conversion rates so that SEO keyword research can factor in not only search volume, results competition, but also some measures of commercial intent through conversion rates. SEO, as you said, is a long term investment, so PPC can be a great research tool to guide the effort and investment. I look forward to next weeks whiteboard friday.

5 THINGS EVERY SEO NEEDS TO SUCCEED IN THE SEO INDUSTRY1) Explain SEO – SEO is a “buzzword” many business owners hear and marginally understand – but it’s very safe to assume they do not know the whole story. Even if they think they do the odds favor that they were informed (or misinformed) a long time ago. The world of SEO changes daily – so unless they heard about SEO yesterday or today from an SEO expert then it’s important you start from scratch. Tell them how SEO works (broad overview) and why it’s time consuming, difficult, and well worth the effort.Building your relationship with this new client on assumptions of SEO prowess is a bad idea.2) Be Honest – Perhaps the most common mistake is not being 100% honest and upfront about the time needed and the lack of instant results often associated with SEO. As you all know SEO takes time, and lots of it!The client will likely not know this and must be told upfront that SEO can often take upwards of 9-12 months (in some niches) to see any quantifiable results! There are of course cases where results happen faster – but it’s always best to over estimate time then to underestimate it.3) Make sure you have a legally sound contract – It is crucial to have a legally sound contract to protect both yourself and your client. SEO is a very unpredictable industry and as an SEO professional you have limited control over the outcome of a campaign. You might be saying – “hey wait, I’m the best SEO ever – its guaranteed with me!”…well it’s not. You aren’t Google. It’s crucial to layout the monthly rates, the time needed and any opt out clauses that protect you and the client. In other words – make sure this contract is air tight and ready to roll when you are at the table with the client.4) Send Reports – Once you have the client make sure you stay in touch. Send reports on a monthly basis (at a minimum). Include their rankings (for the keywords you are targeting) and the + or – change when compared to the last month. Also include any crucial traffic data as well. Increases in certain segments of traffic (advanced segments in Google Analytics can be your best friend here!). One common complaint many businesses have with their SEO company (present or past) goes something like this…” They never send reports, I never hear from them!” bad way to do business!5) Be Proactive – Surprise your clients…check in on them, call them! Imagine how happy they will be if you were to call them once a month. Your SEO clients DO NOT want be treated like a number. They want you to know their name and speak to them once in a while. They are spending quite a lot (I hope!) on your services – so make sure they feel attended to.

I see PPC more as a testing tool than a marketing channel and since it is easy to set up and execute, it can never become a competitive advantage for any business. Anyone can rank high through PPC but not everyone can rank high in organic search results. However both seo and ppc together can significantly improve the CTR of your organic and paid search listings. Here is one excellent post on PPC vs. SEO on outspoken media where Rand seems to be winning as a seo guy :)

Being a hard core SEO person myself, enjoyed the the total Pro SEO WBF and the title .

SEO surely adds up to the creativity and helps create valuable footprints on the web for the website which in the long run surely are helpful for meaningful and focused visibility of the site on the search engines and on the web holistically.

In a PPC campaign you are all the time thinking about the bid amount whereas in an SEO campaign you are constantly thinking of making the website qualitative.

In order to get organic rankings one has to work on the, on page and off page factors and also try to get as many inbound links as possible. In short the site has to be made search engine friendly and so qualitative that people would link to it.But, in contrast the PPC rankings are directly related to the amount you are willing to pay for every click. You get listed under the sponsored links or Ads. even if your site’s on page and off page factors are totally zero. As a result inspite of the immediate business that you get as a result of PPC listings, your website does not create its footprints on the web and once the PPC campaign is discontinued your website disappears on the invisible web.

PPC is temporary where as SEO is permanent or at least long term driven.

Initially, when the website is new and SEO efforts will take a while to show results and if the client will benefit from the PPC campaign then it is important to have a focus on the PPC campaign by allocating a certain budget for a few months and by monitoring the campaign effectively on a daily basis.

Once the organic rankings are achieved the PPC budgets can be cut down gradually stage wise.

Its all about managing the online marketing budget of the client effectively by bringing the targeted traffic to the site and increase conversions and eventually give a good ROI and at the same time future proof the online presence.

I dont really agree with the notion that PPC campaigns will quickly rank high just because of your budget. Having invested time effort and money into brand new sites I can confirm that the quality score of a website is vital. I personally see a huge amount of overlap between pagerank and quality score as there is also an overlap with SEO and PPC as others have pointed out. Using both together effectivelly will gradually allow you to lower your CPC as your site grows in authority, acquires more and more links, and has optimised on page content. I will say however, that PPC campaigns can be the best choice depending on your goals - for example if you are in need of a direct response campaign over a period of time where you want online sales you cant compare SEO with PPC - however I agree that a site that adheres to SEO best practice will make PPC campaigns cheaper and more effective.

I'm sorry WebProTech, but I simply don't agree with most of your comment. What is frightening is that so many SEO practicioners seem to suffer from the same illusions.

"in a PPC campaign you are all the time thinking about the bid amount" - Only if you want to fail. Good PPC managers think about conversions first, last, and always. PPC is a platform for improving site architecture, raising conversion rates, AND identifying the messages that really resonate with your target audience.

PPC is also a great tool for finding new organic opportunities, defining your marketing funnel, testing new products/services/price points, etc. It's an essential tool in any search marketer's toolbox.

"PPC is temporary where as SEO is permanent" - Hardly. SEO in any sort of competitive niche is forever. SEO will never stop if you're working on a term that more than 9 other businesses find valuable. What's more, ranking signals are constantly evolving. If I get your site to rank #1 today and don't touch it for 18 months, you *might* still be #1...and you might not be top 10.

"Once the organic rankings are achieved the PPC budgets can be cut down" - What basis do you have for this comment? I've found that the most high-intent search terms perform incredibly well with PPC - so well, in fact, that maintaining a PPC campaign indefinitely is cheaper than TV ads, radio, print, display, trade shows, etc.

Additionally, many studies have shown that PPC and SEO side-by-side can improve CTR for both organic and paid listings.

Not that I'm attacking personally, but many of your conclusions are way off base. PPC is an incredibly effective form of marketing that rivals both SEO and email in ROI. Anyone who ignores PPC at the expense of SEO is a fool - both are important.

>>> PPC is an incredibly effective form of marketing that rivals both SEO and email in ROI. Anyone who ignores PPC at the expense of SEO is a fool - both are important.

I agree with most of this statement, but Fool may be a bit harsh. Misinformed, mistaken or misguided may be better terms.

These days I seem to spend 40% of my time on SEO projects, 40% on PPC campaigns and 40% on Analytics Analysis, CRO & Reporting. Doing the math on that does mean that I am handling more complete search marketing campaigns for clients that in years past. But in the end they all are piece of the same puzzle and congruently result in a positive increase to the bottom line.

I agree, SEO + PPC should work together along side Display and social too =) I have been lucky enough to work all all mediums,

People who say PPC is all about who is willing to pay the most, that is true you can pay the most but it means you are only going to be ranking for a short time becuase you are going to blow your budget, Good PPC's know all the ins and outs of quality score and all the other strategies that go with PPC, I admit I a few years ago I use to think PPC sucked and it easy and no work involved until I sat down with people who manage millions in PPC budgets monthly and they showed me all the different things involved, It was crazy how much PPC's have to know to be good PPC's. Been a good PPC involves way more then just knowing how to bid for keywords you need to know so many different strategies and tactics =) PPC also comes down to design and landing page quality I mean I could sit here all day and talk about PPC strategies, moral of the story is that it is not just about bidding the most.

Well, well many PPC lovers seem to be offended by my comment. But, everyone seems to have missed out on the last statement made i.e

Its all about managing the online marketing budget of the client effectively by bringing the targeted traffic to the site and increase conversions and eventually give a good ROI and at the same time future proof the online presence.

When I say PPC is temporary I mean that when you stop the campaign your Ads. stop being displayed. But in case of SEO even if the client does not renew the SEO contract and stops working on the site, the site continues to rank for organic rankings for a long time if the SEO done as per the norms of the search engines.

PPC strategies no doubt involve working on the landing page design and quality (the qualitative part of a PPC campaign) - as the ROI shall totally depend on the conversions and at the end of the day the client wants the conversions, traffic and a high ROI.

SEO too involves this as a part of its strategy in fact right from the beginning of the SEO campaign as both PPC and SEO give you search engine presence and having a right landing page is necessary.

In an SEO campaign in fact the site has the possibility of every web page of your website be ranked for different targeted keywords and can be the landing page for those keywords increasing your search engine presence multifold.

Any marketing campaign can do without PPC or rely on PPC for some time at the apt stage of the marketing campaign but no marketer can ignore SEO when it come to search engines as SEO gives the long term presence and all round visibility on the web on all search options and also future proofs it unlike the PPC where the website display of rankings disappear when you discontinue with the campaign.

Ignoring SEO and only giving importance to PPC and recommending only PPC to the client is doing injustice to the client and is a wrong marketing strategy . Many SMEs and SMOs can do without PPC but not without SEO.

I get a little upset when SEO's argue that PPC isn't as useful or as good as SEO. It's like saying all people from Colorado (my home state) are skinny and attractive...despite my picture (which is evidence to the contrary). It's a wild generalization that no search professional should ever make.